He couldn’t let Augusta go, he knew that as he put a comforting hand on his sister’s hair.
He would have to go after her, no matter what she asked.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Scottish border announced itself in the gradual coarsening of the landscape. Augusta pressed her forehead to the carriage window and watched the change silently.
Three days on the road. Three nights in coaching inns, where the beds were too narrow.
Olivia sat across from her, a sketchbook open on her lap, though Augusta strongly suspected her sister had not turned a page in at least an hour. The pencil moved in small, repetitive patterns, her mind clearly elsewhere.
Neither of them had mentioned Hudson. Neither of them had mentioned Oakhart House.
The carriage slowed.
Augusta registered the change in velocity before the driver’s voice reached them. A shouted exchange with someone on the road, the horses’ pace slowing from a trot to something more deliberate. She sat up instinctively, her hand finding the window strap.
“We’re being hailed, miss,” the driver called down, his voice carrying the particular blend of uncertainty and deference that hired men reserved for situations they had not been briefed to anticipate. “Gentleman on horseback. Says he’s the Duke of…”
The rest of the title was swallowed by the sound of hooves on gravel, and then the carriage door was wrenched open with a force that made the entire vehicle rock on its wheels.
Hudson stood in the doorway. His hair was wild from the wind, his cravat undone, and his expression was that of a man who had not slept in three days and had entirely ceased to care about the fact.
Augusta’s breath left her lungs in a silent exhale.
“You,” Hudson said. The word emerged rough, scraped, carrying the accumulated fury of a journey undertaken at a pace that would have killed a lesser horse and very nearly killed its rider. “You packed your things and walked out of my house as though the past months meant nothing, as though…”
Augusta stepped down from the carriage. Her legs, stiff from days of travel, nearly betrayed her. Hudson’s hand shot out to steady her, his fingers closing around her elbow with a firmnessthat suggested he was not entirely confident she wouldn’t bolt for the nearest hillside the moment he released her.
Olivia remained in the carriage with her sketchbook and the air of someone who had developed a sudden interest in the grain of the woodwork.
They walked twenty yards, perhaps, to a flat stretch of grass beside the road where the hills rose on either side and the sky opened above them in a sweep of pale northern blue that felt obscenely beautiful, given the circumstances.
“How could you?” Hudson gritted out. He had stopped several feet away from her, as though proximity itself was dangerous, as though standing too close might reduce whatever he had come to say to something incoherent. “How could you make that decision without—without giving me the chance to…”
“To what?” Augusta prompted. “To talk me out of it? To present an alternative that would magically erase the fact that my name,myfather’sname, is being printed in scandal sheets across London? To assure me again that everything would be well when we both know it wouldn’t?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I did it for Cassie. For your family. For your reputation. For all the things you’ve spent your entire life building, Hudson, which I would have destroyed simply by remaining in your house. You know that. You’ve known it since the moment you read that article.”
Hudson made a low, frustrated sound. He closed the distance between them in two strides, his hands curling around her shoulders. His grip was just shy of painful.
“My reputation,” he said, each word precise and weighted, “is ink on paper. It is gossip in drawing rooms. It is the accumulated opinions of people whose judgment I have never respected and whose approval I have never sought.” His fingers tightened. “You are not ink, Augusta. You are not gossip. You are the woman who walked into my house and rearranged every assumption I had about what my life was supposed to be. I will be damned if I allow you to sacrifice yourself on the altar of something as meaningless as a scandal sheet.”
Augusta stared at him. The anger was still there, banked but present, a warm coal in her chest that she had been nursing since the moment she sealed those letters. But beneath it, something else was stirring. Something precarious and dangerous and so unwelcome that she nearly took a step back to escape it.
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “You do not understand what it is like for a girl… for Cassie when she sees?—”
“I will protect Cassie.” The certainty in his voice was absolute, unshakable. “With every resource at my disposal, with every connection, with every secret I’ve accumulated over six years of running a gaming hell that half the ton frequents. The scandal will pass. They always do. And Cassie will emerge from it because she is my sister, and because she has you, and because between the three of us, I rather think we can managethe collective opinion of a society that spends its afternoons debating the merits of different shades of cream.”
Augusta wanted to believe him. Oh, how she wanted to. The desire rose in her throat with a force that nearly undid her composure. She pressed her lips together and looked at the hills, because looking at Hudson’s face was more than she could currently bear.
Her throat closed up. “Hudson…”
“I’m in love with you.” He said it simply, directly, with none of the hedging or qualification that characterized his usual speech. Just the words, clean and honest and devastating in their simplicity. “I think I have been ever since you looked at me with that defiance in my office at the Nightingale.”
He released her shoulders and stepped back. Then, with a formality that belonged in a ballroom rather than a roadside in the shadow of the Scottish border, he went down on one knee in the grass.
“Augusta Booth,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
